They keep collaring more does each winter to have collars on deer to replace the collars that have quit functioning due to the battery going dead. There are also deer with just ear tags that can’t be seen by a hunter in the population and they aren’t being harvested either so it isn’t hunters just not shooting the marked ones.
During the 2007 deer season Pennsylvania Game Commission deer aging teams pulled teeth from over 5000 adult bucks and sent them to Matson’s Laboratory in Montana for accurate aging by cross sectioning.
They found that 73% of them were 2 ½ years old, 19% were 3 1/2, 5% were 4 ½ and of the remaining 3% one was 10 ½ years. The one 10 ½ was harvested in the Quehanna Wild Area during the last legal hour of the last day of the season.
Dick Bodenhorn
Yum, that 10 year old sounds tasty.